460 - BURY THEM NOT

Apart from the stone water tower, few major

construction projects were under way but, as

usual, the layout of lower Manhattan was

undergoing constant change. Settlement of the

affairs of the late (29 years ago) property owner

Captain Robert Richard Randall finally drew

to a close when the U. S. Supreme Court cleared

his land title to the area around today’s

Washington Square. The original will, by the

way, had been drawn up by no other than

Alexander Hamilton. The freed funds will be

used to purchase land on Staten Island for

construction of Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a

retirement home for, “aged, decrepit, and 

worn-out sailors”, and to provide for its

maintenance.

As for the Square itself, it had at one time

been a potter’s field, where the city’s poor

were buried in unmarked graves. Which

made it a handy repository for criminals

hanged on a nearby gibbet. But in New York,

real estate rules and over the last four years

the poor were reburied elsewhere and

expensive homes constructed around the

perimeter. New graveyards, especially for the 

poor, will, of necessity have to be located away

from lower Manhattan as the Common Council

this year bans them from all land south of Canal

Street. Meanwhile street construction goes on

between 13th Street and Canal Street. Eleventh

Street is laid out except for the two-block section

between Broadway and the Bowery, construction

there blocked by the apple orchard of council

member Henry Brevoort, a buddy of Washington

Irving’s. The second incarnation of Grace Church

will rise on the site in 1843. Four blocks to the

south, on lower Third Avenue one of the city’s

many public markets will be laid out this year

and named for the previous owner of the land,

the late former governor and U. S. vice-president

Daniel D. Tompkins. More changes to the city’s

infrastructure are in the works this year as

incorporation papers are filed for the Manhattan

Gas Light Company, which will soon be

providing gas street lights for the new

neighborhoods.

Part of the impetus for the move of old money

further uptown is the deteriorating condition

of the area known as Five Points on the east

side of the city a few short blocks northeast of

City Hall. Here, where Park and Baxter streets

intersect and Anthony Street thrusts its way

into the crossing, buildings erected on formerly

filled-in swamp land, the old Collect Pond,

have begun to collapse in on themselves, driving

out all but the most destitute. And there are over

13,000 of these unfortunates, existing in streets

of flop houses and taverns, precursor of the

tenements of the Lower East Side and the Bowery

of future decades. Letters are beginning to appear

in the New York Sun, complaining that these 

slums are not being demolished.

Across town (in today’s Triangle Below Canal

Street, or Tribeca neighborhood), sits St. John’s

Park, one of the city’s more exclusive

neighborhoods. Now, in 1830, the residents

have erected an iron replacement for the wooden

fence that had surrounded the park they all face.

As in a latter-day Gramercy Park, the gates are

kept locked, the property owners all having their

own keys. After the U. S. Civil War our budding

millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt will knock

down the fence, level the park’s greenery and

convert the area into a stable for new toys, the 

iron steeds of his New York Central & Hudson

River Rail Road.

Broadcast on WXXI-FM / Simon Pontin's Salmagundi - April 2006

© 2006  David Minor / Eagles Byte